Lycos 30 Day Challenge - An Introduction

Earlier this week I was stumbled up Lycos Search again, after what must be at least 3 years not thinking of it. The results that day were pretty good. So I tweeted about the results and decided to do a 30 day challenge, of only using lycos for my search.

After a bit of chat on Twitter with @lycos they agreed to be part of the challenge, listening to my feedback and findings (good and bad). They agreed to take my thoughts on board and action them where appropriate, indeed as you will see from the diary section of the #Lycos30 challenge they have already began actioning my feedback.

I must point out the idea behind the challenge was to see just how good Lycos is and not to change what they do or how they do it. However, I am more than happy that Lycos are listening to my feedback and have decided to work with me, being open and honest about their short-comings and what they do well. This is too their credit, and indeed they have officially made the lycos 30 day challenge part of their development schedule such that they can work to correct any issues I find and make their search better.

@andykinsey we're taking #lycos30 challenge seriously here. Or Ops group has set aside a project timeline devoted to issues that u have.

What I've found so far...

Today I am in my third day and already it is clear Lycos as a whole is a mixed bag of great, good and not so good / bugs. So far the issue has been primarily with the structure of the website, finding bugs such as image search not working on android phone browsers (now fixed and tested) and the annoyance of the search taking over my screen due to a max-width issue. However, Lycos does have some great stuff on it's side.

Lycos uses a dribble down search from yahoo (maybe bing) they are open about that. But what is fascinating is that the search results from Lycos seem much for relevant than either Bing or Yahoo. It's still not on par with Google yet, but this could also be a layout issue in that the page can look empty and it doesn't show exact urls / breadcrumbs and the page titles aren't bold enough to strike you. Google still feels cleaner in strict search regards, but Lycos is far far superior to other search engines when it comes to search advertising. If it isn't relevant it isn't on the page, something google and bing should learn from!

Find out more about #Lycos30

If you would like to find out more about the lycos 30 day challenge you can head over to seoandy.net/lycos (also in the navigation bar at the top).

You can get live updates by following me @andykinsey or the tag #Lycos30
@Lycos will also be using that tag to continue the conversation.